Blog Archive
Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Google is rolling out a new layout for image search, and it’s nicely improved. About 7%+ of all searches are for images, and while people are willing to go deeper (considering more results before making a choice), the top results are going to be chosen much more frequently. It’s much more user friendly: with long scrolling pages filled with images and tons of options to narrow your search. I like the mouse-over the best, where it expands the image, with the originating website, size, and format.
And importantly it has sponsored links. So for home improvement, fashion and hair cuts, photography and portraits, how-to and other very popular types of searches, this can be a fantastic new avenue for advertisers.
What’s a marketer to do to take advantage of this?
- Advertise
- Always name your image appropriately so it can be categorized accurately
- Determine important searches that could relate to your products and services
- Make multiple sizes
- Make multiple colors
- Line drawings? Clip art?
- Include a watermark or product name
- Photograph your product being used
Posted in Google, images | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
When Google came out for a visit last month we got hints that they might be ready to kill the "previous interface" option for finding new keywords in Google AdWords. And today (tonight we think) it seems that they did finally. There is a hint of a new backend that might be better called "nostradamo" that is linked from the new keyword interface, but it’s broken right now.
Why I liked the old version better.
- I was used to it. (lame I know, but still)
- Less broad. Now I enter a keyword and I get a huge amount of synonyms and I have to go in and uncheck the categories.
- Automatic. Hear me out here. So in the old version if you didn’t add anything into the box if would automatically give suggestions on anything that was in your ad group already. SO you could enter some placeholders in Google AdWords Editor, post them, then look for suggestions. Seems like not a big deal, but it saved time, and it felt like a lot of time. If the new interface had this one option, I think I would like it more.
- This is a big one: "Don’t show me suggestions for other keywords." This allowed you to quickly get estimated monthly searches for your previously chosen keywords. So we would settle on a set of keywords to recommend to clients, and would then want to go get number of search estimates.
There are some things I do like: The ability to drop different keywords into different ad groups. That’s nice.
And of course this comes at a bad time. There are three of us tonight working on deadlines, and we’re all sending sad and frustrated IM’s back and forth about it. You can still access the open version that isn’t tied to your account. But that means that you can’t save them into the ad group. Also the keyword tool in Editor is still working, but that works only 1 keyword at a time.
So my plea to Google: PLEASE bring back the previous interface.
Please leave comments (legitimate – we’ll ruthlessly delete spam.)
Tags: AdWords, Google, keyword tool
Posted in Google, PPC, SEM, SEO | 2 Comments »
Friday, April 30th, 2010
Kind of fun. This computer has probably queried Google at least 1000 times today… keep getting prompted to prove I’m a human visitor. Checking for saturation of .EU top level domains in France only searches on Google.FR and just got this form. Finally found a use for all those French classes.
Tags: European Union, France
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
The popular sandwich shop near my house has been freaky slow lately– half-hour waits and the drivers seem to get lost even though I live on the same street and only three blocks away. Go figure.
Google, on the other hand, is insanely fast– picking up new sites and ranking them in as little as 10 hours. We helped a web developer launch a new client site yesterday on a brand new, just registered domain at 4:30PM CDT. We added the domain to the usual Google, Yahoo! and Bing URL submission forms, set up Google Webmasters Tools with a sitemap XML feed. This morning when we got to work– there was the site, ranking in Google number one for their brand. A quick check of the Google Webmasters Site Crawl report indeed confirmed it: Googlebot visited and indexed one page.
Yahoo! was just as fast if not faster as they’ve indexed a total of three pages from the new site over night, BUT they missed the homepage and rank the "privacy policy" page at number two for the brand– not ideal.
So far, nothing on Bing.
Tags: bing, Google, Search engine optimization, Site map, yahoo
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Neilsen reports Bing added almost 2% to their share of searches in February over January. By the time the Yahoo! And Bing search merger is complete, the two engines should command more than 26.5% of all US search. The real question is how will Yahoo! users respond to Bing natural search results? If they like Bing, the two groups might have the critical mass necessary to steal some Google users. The merger informational site set up at SearchAlliance.com notes that “algorithmic search” results will be completely integrated by the end of 2010. And depending at where they are in the process prior to the holiday shopping season, Yahoo! Search Marketing might exist until the first quarter of 2011.
China is the really interesting area to watch right now. If the Chinese government does not renew Google’s license to operate search in their country, Bing stands to step in and go head-to-head with Baidu. The decision will greatly affect the stock prices for Baidu, who closed above Google in trading yesterday at $573.
Tags: algorithmic search, baidu, bing, Chinese government, Google, google china, Google Inc., google stock, Internet search engines, Organic search, yahoo, yahoo bing merger, Yahoo! Inc.
Posted in Google, SEM, SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Wow, how fabulous is this screen shot of a bunch of our clients Google Analytics accounts? Almost everyone is way up, and a lot of those are from Search – both organic and paid. Everyone’s been working hard for our clients and it shows!
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Posted in Analytics, PPC, SEM, SEO | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
We’ve been playing with the update to the Google search engine code named "Caffeine". It’s kind of a silly name, but most folks seem to like the practice of naming these updates– I suspect we’ll see more, sillier names as time goes on. In any event, Google might have done a bit more research into the effect of the drug on spiders: caffeine web
Anyway, at first glance the Google update is fast. Very fast. It is also vast– containing over 18 billion web pages, or 2 billion more than the live Google index. The new search also seems to be a bit less affected by link spam. I’ve been critical of Google’s over-emphasis on incoming links for the last few years– allowing spam monkeys to inject themselves into results by just having a million links. EDU top level domains seem to fare a bit better in search rankings. My only wish is that Wikipedia is not always the assumed first result for informational searches– no obvious change there. Someone else should have a chance to rank on the number 5– The Jackson Five perhaps.
Probably the biggest change that we’ve noticed and it may not last once Caffeine is moved to a live environment, but international search has lost their "search for pages in our country" as an option. For example the current Google.DE has three search options, "Das Web", "Seiten auf Deutsch" and" Seiten aus Deutschland". Caffeine only offers all web search and only in German, which may mean that some of us who have optimized international sites on a top level domain targeting a particular country may have to revisit the code and focus on language. Or, perhaps setting the website target region in Google Webmaster’s Tools will actually have an effect:
Time will tell.
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to form alliances with great local companies, including Minneapolis PR firm Maccabee Group. Maccabee Group Public Relations today announced the formation of NODE, its new social media and online reputation management practice. Through Maccabee Group/NODE, the Minneapolis-based PR agency will help clients take advantage of new and emerging technologies, including platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Leading Maccabee Group/NODE will be Mike Weiner, who has been named the agency’s Director of Web & Interactive Strategies.
A hallmark of Maccabee Group/NODE will be the founding of alliances with online marketing partners hand-picked for their value to Maccabee clients. Maccabee Group announced the first of those partnerships this week – an alliance with Minneapolis-based search engine marketing agency Nina Hale Consulting. Nina Hale will assist Maccabee Group in optimizing its clients’ Web sites and content to drive positive search engine results. Maccabee Group, Inc. is a national brand public relations agency providing clients with award-winning media relations, event marketing, brand strategy and social media/online reputation management counsel.
Posted in SEM, SEO, Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Today’s Minneapolis StarTribune featured a story on a local teen (Louis Wang) who came up with an algorithm to enhance Yahoo’s search engine results–when he was 14. He’s hopeful that his patent will be approved soon, and he’s presenting at Nashville this week at the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining. Wow! Now the next question is, are you looking for a summer internship before your eventual move to Silicon Valley? And I sure hope you also applied to my Alma Mater, Brown University.
Tags: algorithm
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
